countries which they inhabit have become fully conscious of their
essential identity and racial unity.

No less important than the physical aspect of their country on the
development of the Serbs has been the fact that right through the middle
of it from south to north there had been drawn a line of division more
than two centuries before their arrival. Artificial boundaries are
proverbially ephemeral, but this one has lasted throughout the centuries,
and it has been baneful to the Serbs. This dividing line, drawn first by
the Emperor Diocletian, has been described on p. 14; at the division of
the Roman Empire into East and West it was again followed, and it formed
the boundary between the dioceses of Italy and Dacia; the line is roughly
the same as the present political boundary between Montenegro and
Hercegovina, between the kingdom of Serbia and Bosnia; it stretched from
the Adriatic to the river Save right across the Serb territory. The
Serbo-Croatian race unwittingly occupied a country that was cut in two by
the line that divides East from West, and separates Constantinople and the
Eastern Church from Rome and the Western. This curious accident has had
consequences fatal to the unity of the race, since it has played into the
hands of ambitious and unscrupulous neighbours. As to the extent of the
country occupied by the Serbs at the beginning of their history it is
difficult to be accurate.

The boundary between the Serbs in the west of the peninsula and the
Bulgars in the east has always been a matter of dispute. The present
political frontier between Serbia and Bulgaria, starting in the north from
the mouth of the river Timok on the southern bank of the Danube and going
southwards slightly east of Pirot, is ethnographically approximately
correct till it reaches the newly acquired and much-disputed territories
in Macedonia, and represents fairly accurately the line that has divided